Synopses & Reviews
Precarious office friendships and email romance; delicate status politics; multiple femininities and masculinities; changing employment practices and career pathways; temporal and spatial practices of regulation, detection and slipping free - these analytical themes comprise the core of Tomoko Kuriharas ethnography, Japanese Corporate Transition in Time and Space. A skillful analysis of the subtleties of language and embodiment discloses the various knowledges and practices that reinforce and subvert ideology and culture within the workplace community. This fieldstudy brings the work of continental theorists Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel de Certeau into conversation with the anthropology of Japan. It is a significant contribution to the new specialist areas in anthropology, of organizations, and of management practices.
Synopsis
This book is an ethnography of a Japanese white-collar workplace in Osaka carried out during the late 1990s. It explores the relevance of social models to the analysis of social relations and women's status in the workplace by examining concepts of time, ritual, and space via the theory of practice. It emphasizes how the workplace is experienced and shaped through the interaction of management and workers, framing critiques of macro and micro-analytical models of hierarchies in Japanese business and society.
About the Author
TOMOKO KURIHARA is a social anthropologist. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at Cambridge University, Department of Geography (2004) and Faculty of Social and Political Sciences (2005-6). She was an Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics, Department of Sociology (2002-3). This is her first monograph.
Table of Contents
Introduction * The Japanese Labour Market and the Structuring of Social Relations in the Company by Gender * Experiencing Social Structure at the Point of Recruitment and the Tracking System * Analyzing Social Structure in the Workplace through Experience * The Workplace as a Symbolic Community * The Office Space and Social Relations * The Impact of Interactive Technology on Social Dynamics in the Office